Is the HTC Opera UL really the Facebook Phone?

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One of the tech world’s favorite on again/off again rumors is back on, Geek readers, with Pocket-Lint claiming it has a source that has confirmed there definitely is a Facebook Phone being built for Facebook by HTC. That distinction is important, of course, because the previous Facebook phones that wound up hitting the market actually turned out to be HTC phones with dedicated Facebook buttons on them. This new phone has shown up in the NenaMark database as the HTC Opera UL.

It comes as no surprise that it’s got a codename: badging it as the HTC Facebook Phone would have raised a few too many eyebrows at this stage of the game.

Since the handset popped up on NenaMark, a few key details about its hardware have been revealed. HTC looks to be using a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon Plus SoC clocked at 1.4GHz, which isn’t specifically revealed, but lines up with the phone’s Adreno 305 GPU, which is called out. The 28nm chip also features integrated Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11n Wi-Fi, which have become fairly standard on today’s smartphones. And like most other solid smartphones on the market, the Opera UL sports a 1280 x 720 display. Its diagonal measurement is not yet known, so there’s no way to guess how its pixel density will match up with the competition. Then again, those internals do sound a bit like what’s in the HTC 8X — so perhaps the Opera UL is a re-tooled version that will still feature a 4.3-inch 342ppi display.

Previous rumors had pegged the Facebook Phone to be coming sometime in the middle of 2013, but Mark Zuckerberg quickly shot those down. A phone just doesn’t make any sense, he claimed, and perhaps it still doesn’t. Perhaps the Opera UL will turn out to be the HTC Salsa 2.0 with better internals and a design (possibly including a coat of blue paint like the 8S above) that’s more likely to attract customers.